Her father had never understood her music—and so he had never really understood her. That was her conclusion as she went up to her room. Dad didn’t understand, Van had never properly understood. Tom didn’t, really. Who, then? Julian Vereker, her first boyfriend, lovely Jules, the refusenik drummer of Jensen and the Interceptors—who had actually quit their band, comically enough, because, he said, “I’m sick of being the one who is always in charge of ending the songs!” He was a lousy drummer, but he loved music in the same way as she did. They used to lie on the floor, holding hands, between his parents’ ridiculously large Wharfedale hi-fi speakers. Julian reeked of his teenager’s vulgar aftershave … Denim, it was called.
Music was now her official life; and much more important, it was her secret joy. Because she was really the girl—not Jenny—in “Rock & Roll,” who felt that nothing was happening at all, until one fine morning she turned on a New York radio station and couldn’t believe what she heard. When she was twelve, Helen turned on the radio, and heard—not Lou Reed, but Joe Jackson’s “It’s Different for Girls,” and that was that. Not Jenny’s New York radio; not “Mohammed’s Radio” either (sweet song, that one); but her radio, which played always inside her.
Music had been far more reliable than friends or parents or lovers. It never abandoned her, it was always there to teach and instruct, console and excite. Songs structured her life. What philosophy was to Van, music was to Helen. She didn’t just like the songs—that was what ordinary people felt—but took them inside her. Joe Jackson spoke to her because she was just beginning to feel, at almost thirteen, that it was definitely different for girls. Four years later, she was actually the girl who left the north for Euston station, with this really ragged notion that you’ll return, as that great Smiths song went. (She never really did return. It was King’s Cross, but close enough.) She once told a cruel boyfriend to try a little tenderness, because Otis Redding said he should. (For years, she had thought Otis’s same old shaggy dress was a shabby one.) At her school, the boy hero, the sporty handsome boy all the girls fell in love with—he is of pure and noble breed—was actually called, no kidding, David Watts, just as the Jam said he was! Her first kiss happened at a party (joss sticks and crimson lightbulbs) while the Human League was clicking out “Don’t You Want Me”—tinny music from tinny speakers, but a real kiss. (She did want, she did.) Long before she experienced an orgasm, she had an idea—no: more than an idea, a feeling right between her legs—of what that event might be like, from the cosmic climax, the stellar come, that the scandalously underpaid Clare Torry screamed out in “The Great Gig in the Sky.” When she went through a phase of political rebellion, “The Eton Rifles” and “Cortez the Killer” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” gave her the words, lent her the energy and excitement: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. (And the Sex Pistols, with their stunning aggression and their funny, trilling, Dalek voices.) Radiohead’s “No Surprises” and Ian Dury’s “You’ll See Glimpses”—the best and saddest song of all—always made her think of Van, and of Van’s precarious happiness. (Van, Van!) And when her mother was dying, Helen wept and wept at Peter Gabriel’s beautiful “Wallflower,” and its hopeful coda: And I will do what I can do. (She could do nothing, of course.)
And for joy and dancing? Martha and the Muffins, “Echo Beach.” Dancing to that song at university, at four in the morning, at that party after the end-of-term gig, when her own fairly crappy Oxford band (Ironic Erection) had played onstage alongside the best-known Cambridge band (President Reagan Is Not Clever). Or even better: the first time she ever heard Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye sing “Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing.”
Well, there ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, and the real thing was rock music, and she had experienced it.
Had Dad ever understood that? Any of it? He once said he liked “You’ll See Glimpses.” A big concession. And he certainly implied, more than once, that he fancied “the dark-haired one in Abba.” Ah! Okay.
Why secret? Why a secret joy? Because rock and roll, as she understood it, wants to destroy the stupid comfort of the world: Search and destroy. That was the atrocious and rather unfunny irony of being a record company suit … Rock music, the rock and roll she liked, wanted to tear down the Sony tower. (Obviously, she could never confess this to anyone, but this faith of hers explained her increasing boredom around the Dave Matthews Band. Where’s the garlic? Frank Zappa’s all-important question. Universally applicable, she felt.) The world had always told Helen to “put away childish things.” Her fancy schools had groomed her for work, for the taming of eros, prepared her to dress in the right uniform, make obeisance to pragmatism, success, and financial self-aggrandizement. Everything existed to be made use of. “Life” was conceived of as entirely pragmatic—work, office nonsense, commuting, relentless haste and fatigue, imperfect weekends, a bit of sleep: that was “the world.” And that was where she had ended up: economics, the “wise” choice at university; days spent inside an office. Life was something else, too. It was endless loss: Mum. Growing up had turned out to be something like the Roman ave atque vale, simultaneously an opening and closing, a welcome that was really a long farewell. There was no help, no protection from suffering. Two things slowed down this steady movement, this laborious death march, two young facts argued against it: children and rock and roll. And really, they were the same thing. “Put away childish things,” said the world, and “come and join the reasonable grown-ups.” But rock opened up that barely tolerated space for childishness, for refusal and resistance, for anti-enlightenment, for juvenile irresponsibility and revolt and blissed-out trance. Childishness, really.
For you look at your children and think: This is what we once were; and what we should be again.
The greatest musicians were children, stayed childlike, irresponsible, curiously innocent. They died young, sacrificed themselves, messed up their health and their bodies, so that we can go on living our lives, the long reasonable bourgeois sleep that is our life, tediously tending our bank accounts and dividends, our retirement funds and dinner parties and haircuts and regular dental visits. Rock music is opposed to this. It is the sleep of reason.